Terms & Conditions

[Mike Hughes]

The point was less about frequency of updating and more specifically about making sane decisions about how you notify based on real world factors.

On the whole a physical address changes a lot less than phone numbers or email addresses and there are ways of learning about the former which do not exist for either of the latter. Equally locking yourself out of your physical home can be easily remedied. The number of claimants who lock themselves out of their own email addresses and whose only solution is to create a new account is very high indeed. Accounted for by poor literacy, poor IT literacy and many other factors. Equally the number of people who because of learning disability, poor mental health, specific physical health restrictions and sensory loss cannot use email is huge.

So there’s a choice really. On the one hand email looks cheaper on the surface. In reality why on earth would you use it when you have a physical address? It makes no sense from an adult safe-guarding perspective – an area which many teams simply assume is nothing to do with them despite being located in local government – and, in the long term it makes no sense cost wise or administratively.

There’s a naive assumption that the whole world is digital; that all digital options improve things and that huge digital literacy problems can be swept away with a few poster campaigns and some conversations and training sessions on digital literacy. In reality, it’s creating a perfect storm of something not very good.